Its Name is Depression

Drowning in a pit of my own sanity. Trying to overcome the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and defeat, I am begging… pleading with my brain to let me rest, let me sleep. I need a break from life and reality, I know that’s not plausible but it’s so necessary. I am hurting on a deep level. The lifelong wounds to my soul have never healed, never have I been able to conciliate the pain. I don’t know how to live anymore. Do I continue on this path of destruction? Or do I take a step back to allow myself sanctity? Most of us have this preconceived, movie/ tv screen depiction of depression molded firmly into our brains. We see the beautiful girl laying in bed crying and yielding a bucket of ice cream, angrily rejecting all of her friend’s desperate attempts to make her feel better. Or the skinny boy sitting in a room full of his closest friends and family, guarded off in a dulled corner with sad puppy-dog eyes, shooing off everyone who tries to console him with a shrug and a bleak, “I’m okay”.

Sadly, it’s not that simple. Depression doesn’t warn you of its arrival, or back off just because you have a test the next day or a job interview that afternoon. Depression doesn’t ask you if you’re tired or let you know that you’re about to feel so miserable that you won’t even be able to express the pain to others. Depression bursts though the locked door of your thoughts and hurls daggers of pain, shoots arrows of hatred, and blasts bullets of loneliness into the walls of your being. Depression will allow you to beat your face, find the cutest outfit in your closet, have the best-hair-day of your life, and as you're in the Uber with your closest friends headed to the party of the semester, will come whisper in your ear “you know they all hate you right?” Depression will tap you on the shoulder and tell you that you’re crazy, tell you that you’re ruining the lives of all of your family members and that you’d be better off dead. Depression will tell you that the person that you’re madly in love with could never love a piece of trash like you and make you question every interaction that you have ever had with anyone because, “what if they think I’m weird?” Depression will turn the best day of your life into a mental breakdown alone in your room for reasons that only it can explain. Or render you helpless, unable to accomplish or complete any task, then tell you that it’s your fault for being a worthless piece of shit. Depression will wake you up from a great sleep, then make your closet look as though it 20 miles away and ask “do you really need to go to class?” Or wait until you’ve made it all the way there and tell you that everyone will be laughing at you if you walk through those doors so you might as well just turn back around and go home.

Depression is an everyday battle that seems as though you only win if it allows you to, and fills those days where everything seems to be going perfect with the paranoid suspicion, awaiting its arrival. I didn’t want to give it a name, I didn’t want it to have power over me. All I ever wanted was to just be “okay” again, but it wouldn’t let me. The bad days got stronger and the good days seemed as though they were just a dream, and all I wanted to do was just go back to sleep. This will not be forever, but right now I’m drowning in a pit of my own consciousness.